On Liberty

Product Description

On 10 September 2001 Shami Chakrabarti exchanged the plush Westminster office where she worked as a government lawyer for a tatty converted shop in south London. Starting a new life as legal advisor to the campaigning organization Liberty, Chakrabarti spent her first day absorbing the culture shock of her move from a Goliath-sized department of state to a David-sized NGO. Her second day was 9/11 - and everything changed.

In this frank and personal book, Chakrabarti shows how, since 9/11, our hard-won individual and collective freedoms have been eroded, and are now in unprecedented danger. Over the past years, in the face of terror threats and collapsing economies, politicians and governments have dismissed human rights and civil liberties as commodities to be discarded in critical times, and have offered us a simple trade-off: greater security, in exchange for less freedom. Yet these freedoms, for which generations have fought, both protect and empower us, and curb the power of the mighty - and what's more, warns Chakarabarti, once gone, they will be almost impossible to recover.

Today, we risk living in an entirely new way: a state of permanent emergency, deprived of the rights and freedoms on which our society is founded. Explaining why these liberties are so fundamentally important to the way our democracy works, Chakrabarti draws on her own campaigning work on issues as diverse as privacy laws, ASBOs, and anti-terror legislation. In doing so, she reveals the things that motivate her and spur her on, from her belief in British constitutional and legal traditions, to her own motherhood and the underlying values of our common humanity.